Roar (2022)

Ultimately, the series is an interesting look at several uniquely feminine perspectives — and despite a few weak spots, it's worth watching for the sake of better understanding what it's like to be a woman.

While the show brings a lot of pertinent issues into focus through its absurdist premise, it’s not always actually saying something at the conclusion.

By keeping the stories simple, Roar is able to send its messages without hammering it over viewers’ heads. Could some of the episodes stick their landings better? Sure. But the storytelling in the series mostly solid.

The results are hit-or-miss, as any anthology tends to be, but the overall effect is charming and incisive (even as the show as a whole suffers from some frustrating blind spots).

As is often the case with anthologies, then, it is a mixed bag, at times more of a curiosity than it is a fully realised vision. But when it works, it really works, and even when it doesn’t quite come together, it is different enough to demand your attention.

While the series is having important conversations about the demands and trauma that women are forced to endure in assorted degrees for the simple crime of being women, the approach it adopts doesn't always work, with the form rather than the content often taking centre stage.

Some of the show’s episodes end up much more nuanced than the opening credits’ blunt battle cry of “I am woman, hear me ‘Roar.’” Others, however, embrace that retrograde vibe to become something far more basic.

Some short stories simply work better on the page. Ahern’s tales seem meant to twinkle with wryness and wit, but they also function like a collection of fables, dark bedtime stories that purposely use simple metaphors and follow familiar patterns. They’re meant to leave readers intrigued, to spark the imagination. Yet on-screen, told in succession, some of their wit falls flat and their magic mostly evaporates.

With the exception of a few episodes, it’s the type of shallow, feminist television that demands credit for presenting progressive, purportedly radical ideas without illustrating any of those concepts in ways that are fresh and incisive. In that way, Roar as a project seems a little self-congratulatory.

Every episode needs to push further, either to embrace the weirdness or to deliver an emotional gut-punch. None of them do.

In its attempts to universalize these intensely personal experiences, Roar loses much of the heart that makes them worth caring about to begin with. It’s not that the series is lazy; each installment seems carefully planned and polished, and even the worst have some standout moment of wit or beauty. It’s that in trying to speak for so many, Roar ends up saying very little at all.